Nina Rhodes-Hughes, a 78-year old who was present at the assassination of Robert Kennedy, has come forth with some interesting information about that fateful day. She says there was a second gunman, and more bullets fired than the official count. She alleges that the FBI altered her original statements in a cover-up. Despite being an eye-witness, she was not called to testify at Sirhan Sirhan's trial.
There's of course some interesting circles to go around in here. Did she sit quiet until age 78 out of fear of persecution by the government that covered up her testimony? Or is the fallibility of the human mind responsible for her current statements and recollections? Either way, she's very brave for speaking up, and likely to take a lot of flack for it from people on every side of the angle.
She talks about the rhythm of the gunshots being memorable. Memory can be dangerously mutable, especially across decades. Hopefully she has old diary entries or similar corroboration that this isn't merely a recent perception of distant events. Well I know that it is terribly easy to be certain of a thing, have that thing influence your life forever after, yet leave precious little evidence that you ever were aware of the thing. If we neglect to write down or record those things we could never forget, it becomes difficult later to defend our perceptions about them later when some outsider challenges their validity. I hope she kept good notes.
There's certainly plenty of weird, often conflicting, evidence in the case. RFK's wounds suggest that he was shot from an entirely different angle than from where Sirhan Sirhan was standing. Sirhan's bizarre journals suggest either insanity or programming. The woman in the polka-dot dress shouting "we shot him!" as reported by multiple witnesses in the neighborhood. The police destroying evidence (2,000+ photographs, bullets and the ceiling tiles they were lodged in, etc) in their highest-profile murder investigation ever (destroyed because storage space was limited, they say), and then keeping their internal reports under lock and key for 20 years. This case abounds with surreal twists and dubious shenanigans.
Sirhan and his lawyers continue to argue that he was hypnotized into believing he'd killed Kennedy (prior to the crime). At the time, the American public knew nothing of the CIA's various mind-control experiments. Those programs have been leaked and acknowledged in the years since, and they cast a sinister shadow over a high-profile crime where the facts don't quite add up.
Police can be very selective when listening to witness accounts, and deciding what to follow up on. It's part of their job, but it also gives them a lot of power to stack the deck.
Late last year, I saw a man steal a bicycle. The police arrested a suspect a few days later, in a bust of some sort of bicycle theft ring if I understand correctly. I received a call from a detective, asking whether or not I'd be willing to look at a photo line-up, and whether or not I'd be able to identify the thief if I saw him again. Apparently I didn't seem confident enough in my ability to pick him out, because they never followed up. If I did identify him, my early lack of confidence would have made my testimony easy to undermine in cross-examination. If I failed to pick him out, or said that the suspect was not definitely not him, it would have made conviction very difficult. From the police's point of view, there was nothing to be gained by involving me further in the process.
Most would call that sort of thing just an officer being practical, but one could argue that it's the police selectively editing what evidence the jury hears to manipulate the results of the trial. I was witness to a low-value crime where the police feel no unusual pressure to get a conviction. I imagine the incentive to disregard conflicting testimony and witnesses who don't strengthen the case must be a lot stronger when you're dealing with something as major as the murder of a presidential candidate. Does that mean the RFK investigation crossed into something we'd more likely to view as a conspiracy by the LAPD and FBI were all the details known? Nina Rhodes-Hughes is in a far better position to answer that than I am.
3 comments:
Add to that the fact that every time we remember something, we re-write it in our brain, so the most-remembered events are the least reliable.
See also: studies on Flashbulb memories, like those of the day of an assassination, which show that our memories alter significantly without us knowing it.
Hence, I think all police officers should have to wear video and audio recording equipment at all times.
Add in the fact that police officers routinely rephrase things in a way so as to fulfill statute requirements and you end up in a situation where you never know if it happened that way, if the cop has convinced himself it happened that way, or if the cop is just outright lying to make the case work. This gets really questionable when it's clear that the police officer in question doesn't really understand the $2 words they're using in some situations, but which are required. I also see this with witnesses regularly using phrases in interviews that no normal person on the street uses, so they had to have come from the DA's office.
A daily example is DWI cases here. Seems that everybody who is ever arrested for DWI has bloodshot, watery eyes, slurred speech, and a distinct odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from their facial area. If you say it often enough, your brain starts to accept it as reality, just as a lie repeated often enough can become indistinguishable from the truth.
(This is not to say that I don't think most of these folks deserve the conviction, especially if the chemical test shows they're over the limit. My issue is if the police really have all the probable cause they claim.)
Fortunately, lapel cameras are becoming standard here, which I think will help a lot of in keeping police in line. Unfortunately, they're still optional at the officer's discretion.
Unfortunately recognizing the fallibility of your own observations and the mutability of memory through the act of remembering makes inquiring, intelligent individuals on the scene less reliable for testimony than an idiot who is absolutely dead certain of what happened even though they were in a different room at the time.
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